Book review: Forest of Memory, by Mary Robinette Kowal

13012018

Mary Robinette Kowal is an American SF / fantasy writer, voice actor, and puppeteer. Her work has been nominated for Nebula, Hugo, and Locus awards, and she has won the John W Campbell award, and three Hugo awards, for her fiction.

Forest of Memory is a novella set in a mid-22nd century future so digitally enmeshed that the grid is omnipresent and ever-watchful. So when Authenticity & Capture specialist Katya—who deals, essentially, in the provenance of pre-grid artefacts and digitised memories—experiences disconnection enroute to an important meeting in another town, during a bike ride through an Oregon forest park, it’s an unsettling experience. Particularly because the disconnection has occured simultaneously with—indeed, may even have been initiated by—an enigmatic and seemingly-ruthless deer-hunter. Ambushed, tranquilised, abducted, there’s nothing Katya can manage that will allow her to escape from the mysterious and anonymous figure, and even her efforts to obtain an explanation for whatever he’s doing with the forest’s deer—which apparently requires them to be anaesthetised for an hour or more—are met with confident denial. All she can do is keep watch, and hope that an opportunity for escape, back to the grid’s security, presents itself.

The novella claims to have been typed by Katya on an antique typewriter she has purchased (and which she has in her bike trailer at the time of the encounter with the hunter), and the story therefore contains intentional misspellings, crossings out, and misplaced word spaces. It also doesn’t explain things a reader of the 22nd century would already know, which does mean that some aspects of the story remain obscure. But Katya and her interactions with her eerily-efficient abductor are drawn with admirable clarity, which gives the narrative a sense of grounding that compensates for the absence of detail in some parts of the setting. This is an intriguing, atmospheric piece that indirectly provokes questioning as to how much interconnectedness is desirable, and leaves me keen to check out more of Kowal’s writing.